Annemarie at UNC Chapel Hill

Saturday, December 5, 2009

The University is made up of a large collection of buildings.The oldest building on campus is "South East" which is just across the Old Well and is now a residence hall. Most buildings are referred to as Halls. This is a picturs of Manning Hall. One of the many impressive buildings I pass every day and home to the computer lab. Before the break in October I took a Stata course there, a statistical software programme. They do have SPSS on the computers here as we do at the VU, but hardly anybody uses it. So I had to get acquainted with Stata. I must say it is easier than R.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

The Old Well is the unofficial symbol of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. It was the only source for water when the University was established in 1793. Although it has become more like a meeting place and a photo opportunity than a provider of water, you can still lessen your thirst at the Old Well.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Although my accent is probably Americanized by now and the computers at UNC force the s’s in my papers into z’s and automatically delete the ‘u’s from words such as labour and behaviour, I refuse to call the season of the falling leaves anything but Autumn. Apart from my linguistic hostility I must say it truly is the lovely season that Liesbet promised me.

The sun is shining on the colouring leaves, everywhere you see the squirrels bury their food and the deer cross my path when I walk back to my apartment. There is some rain, but hardly comparable to the amounts typical of a Dutch Autumn. The temperatures are very agreeable and are even going up into the seventies. It feels unnatural, though, to see people in t-shirts and shorts, trotting through the autumn leaves on their slippers.

It was Halloween last week in America. It was Heeloween in North Carolina. Tar Heel is the nickname for North Carolina and its University, its students and its University athletes. The nickname is related to the tar that was created from the pine forests in North Carolina. During the Civil War the North Carolina troops are supposed to have threatened Virginians to put the tar on their heels so they ‘would stick better’.1 And a Tar Heel celebrates Heeloween.

Heeloween in Chapel Hill means, besides trick-and-treating and the costumed parties, a massive gathering on Franklinstreet. According to police reports 50.000 people gathered on Chapel Hill’s main street to experience Heeloween. As a visitor I could only wonder about the joy of the robots, cavemen and women, penguins and Lincolns. A rabbit in a head why I was not wearing a costume. I guess it is one of those parties, like the Dutch Sinterklaas, only understood by people who started celebrating it as a child. Although I was touched by the magic when a rabbit in a head wondered about my 'costume'.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

No, I did not go on a field trip to a rainforest. This is the view just behind my apartment building and it is not a extraordinary spot in Chapel Hill. As soon as you have left campus and are past the two shopping streets this is actually what it looks like here. A lot of green and hilly (although the slope is difficult to make out in the picture). For it to be so green with these temperatures it has to rain regularly of course, and it does. I have not been caught in any heavy showers yet, but that is just luck judging by the abundance of umbrellas in stores that can easily match the stock in stores in Amsterdam.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

With Universities and schools starting after the Summer, the Swine Flu, as they call it here, has plenty of opportunity to spread around in dorms, libraries and class rooms. At UNC several hundreds of student have fallen ill and today I had the first empty seat in my class. He has not been tested positive for H1N1 yet, but the student of another Professor of mine has, so the virus is coming closer. UNC has sofar not created Swine Flu Houses as at Carnegie Mellon University where they isolate all victims in an abondoned dorm to keep the virus from spreading (New York Times, Sept 5). The University here advises us to wash our hands often and when you do catch the virus, to quarantine yourself until the fever has dropped. In the meantime the healthy students are pretty confident they won't catch Swine Flu - they don't keep swines at home.....

Saturday, September 5, 2009

The Comparative Politics course took me to Liesbet and Gary’s house where they teach their courses in their living room. We are with seven students and, if I am correct, only one of us is American. It was the first time I actually read a piece written by Haas himself. I am really looking forward to reading the other classics as well. It is amazing to realise what they imagined the European Community to become when it was only in its diapers and to see, with hindsight, which of their 'predictions' came through and where they went utterly wrong. Next week Moravcsik!

Annemarie van Elfrinkhof

I have been invited by Prof. dr. Hooghe to spend a semester at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill as a visiting scholar, starting August 25, 2009.
UNC is an excellent venue for advanced training in political methodology and comparative and European Politics. It is the home of an important method for party positioning, the Chapel Hill expert survey, and is known for cross validating methods for party positioning. Annemarie is part of the CAMeRa project Text to Political Positions and her training at UNC will benefit the method that she is developing together with Isa Maks and Bertie Kaal (Faculty of Arts) to extract the positions of political parties from texts.